


In Bloom

by Celia_and



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Ballet, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, Ballet, Ballet-typical discussion of body image (not dysfunctional), Cottagecore, Domestic Fluff, Drinking, Eating, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Falling In Love, First Meetings, Fluff, Happy Ending, Loss of Virginity, Masturbation, Missionary Position, Mutual Pining, Oral Sex, Partners to Lovers, Rivals to Lovers, Sassy Rey (Star Wars), Smut, Soft Ben Solo, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates, Unsafe Sex, Vaginal Sex, so much love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-13
Updated: 2020-10-23
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:40:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 13,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26996050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Celia_and/pseuds/Celia_and
Summary: And just when she was getting some serious attention from the teachers at the start of the last, pivotal year of school, he came along with his effortless perfection. She hated him.Right up until she met him, that is.----------The flowers that bedeck her skin don’t lie—ballet dancer Rey is in love with her partner, Ben. But the years go by and his skin stays resolutely, devastatingly blank.He doesn’t love her. But when his hands are on her body, she can pretend.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 653
Kudos: 2667
Collections: Galactic Idiots Collection, Ijustfellintothissendhelp, Reylo Prompt Fills (@reylo_prompts)





	1. Budding

**Author's Note:**

  * For [BensCalligraphySet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BensCalligraphySet/gifts).



> Based on [@galacticidiots’](https://twitter.com/galacticidiots) captivating [prompt](https://twitter.com/galacticidiots/status/1315915574820646912):
> 
> AU where flowers bloom on your skin when you fall for someone. The more you love them, the more they spread. 
> 
> Rey was 16 when she met Ben Solo. 
> 
> At 21, she struggles to hide them.
> 
> At 25, she sees him without a shirt on. His body is a garden and every petal is for her.

He’d been studying at the Royal Danish Ballet School. That’s what they said. Equally proficient in classical and modern. A lightness that belied the strength beneath. Heartrending expression. A once-in-a-generation talent. Tempting him away to the Royal Ballet School had been a coup. That’s what they said—everyone who talked about him.

And _everyone_ talked about him.

She couldn’t escape it: chatter in the corridors, gossip after class. She disliked him long before she knew him. She hated his perfect arches and his preternatural turnout and the way he didn’t have to try. A goddamn prodigy.

 _She_ had to try. Her extension wasn’t the result of genetically loose hips; it was hours of splits and stretching and coaxing her body into something it wasn’t designed to be. Torso too long, knees too knobby. Mediocre arches. It had been a miracle they’d accepted her to the school to begin with. She’d spent her adolescence battling her body for dominance, and she was finally winning. No one was as strong as she was. Her port de bras was poise itself, and she could stick a triple pirouette every damn time. In attitude. With her eyes closed. (She’d tried it.)

And just when she was getting some serious attention from the teachers at the start of the last, pivotal year of school, _he_ came along with his effortless perfection. She hated him.

Right up until she met him, that is.

* * *

“I’m going to try you out with Ben,” Mr. Barrie stops her in the hall to say.

Rey chokes on her water. “I’m sorry, sir?”

“Ben Solo. For the partnering class on Monday. His first day. See how you do together.” He fixes her with an appraising eye.

“Yes, sir, of course.”

“Good, then.”

She screws on the lid to her water bottle more tightly than is strictly necessary, torn between frustration and hope. Because a continental training doesn’t equip a dancer for the RAD style, and he’ll need to adjust, and he might make her look bad while he does. But he’s essentially a shoo-in to the company if he wants, and if they want to see how he does with her, that might mean... No. She tamps the thought down. It’s just because she’s tall.

The girls and boys have a separate technique class in the morning. There’s an energy in the air in the girls’ studio. They haven’t even seen him yet, but his aura seems to have descended over the building. Rey scoffs internally. He’s just a boy: a long-limbed, dark-haired, stupidly talented _boy,_ and he better not get in her way. She’s worked too long and far too hard.

The girls’ class lets out a minute earlier than the boys’, so the girls are already assembled in the next studio for partnering. She grits her teeth. She just needs to make it through this class. She can worry about the next thing there is to worry about later. She sits in a center split and pretends not to watch as the boys troop in. She glances at the mirror to check her alignment, certainly not to see when he comes through the door. He’s the last one in. He hesitates just inside the doorway. Mr. Barrie points him in her direction.

She looks down, shifting to a front split and adjusting her hips. She doesn’t look up even when she sees his feet appear beside her.

He doesn’t say anything, just clears his throat.

_Oh hell no. What, is he too good to speak to her?_

She gets to her feet. It’s only slightly overwhelming how big and broad he is in the flesh. He’s probably quite pale usually, but his cheeks are currently crimson. She doesn’t _entirely_ blame him, seeing as how the entire room is covertly watching him. But he’ll need to be comfortable with a lot more than thirty teenagers watching him if he wants to perform professionally. He opens his mouth, but she cuts in. “You’re Ben, I’m Rey. Try not to mess this up for me, okay?”

Mr. Barrie calls the class to order before he can reply, but his ears flush now too.

“Let’s begin!”

* * *

She lies curled up in bed, too wired to sleep. She really wanted to hate him. She had really, _really_ wanted to hate him, but then his hands had memorized her center of gravity in the first thirty seconds. And he had walked her around in a promenade smooth enough for any professional stage. And spun her in the most controlled partnered pirouettes she’d ever experienced. And when Mr. Barrie had asked them to demonstrate a flying fish, she’d run and leapt with no fear and he’d dipped her low and placed her perfectly on pointe and _this_ was what it was supposed to be like. Partnering.

He’d barely spoken ten words. Just the bare minimum, probably following her lead. But he watched her and felt her and she barely even had time to think about an adjustment before he’d already made it. Mr. Barrie had watched them. _Everyone_ had watched them. Not just him—her too. Because if he was going to be this freaking good, she sure as hell wasn’t going to let him show her up, so her arabesques were higher and her pirouettes were tighter and she’d _exploded_ in that grand jeté, and he’d known exactly how high she would go. He’d caught her precisely at the peak and lowered her so smoothly that she’d felt the room hold its breath. She did too.

For the first time in her life, it had felt easy. Well, not _easy,_ but easier. She’d been working with her body, not against it. They made a good team: him and her body and her. She snuggles further down beneath her covers and grins.

* * *

He eats alone the first week, at the table in the far corner of the cafeteria. He doesn’t look up from his plate. Everyone is too nervous or embarrassed or intimidated to ask him to join them. So they sit in their configurations at their usual tables and he sits alone. After a few days the novelty wears off and he becomes a fixture. That’s how it always was, wasn’t it? Ben Solo sitting at the corner table, at least making his shoulders lower if he can’t make them less broad.

“We should ask him to sit with us,” Rey announces suddenly the following Monday.

“What? Who?” Poe asks.

“Ben.”

Poe scrunches up his nose. “Why?”

Finn laughs. “You’re jealous of him.”

“I’ve never been jealous in my life,” Poe protests, and the rest of the table scoffs.

“Maybe he likes sitting alone, though?” Rose wonders.

Rey glances over at him quickly. “No one likes sitting alone.” She gets to her feet and picks up her tray. “Come on, we’re sitting with him.”

Poe groans, but Finn elbows him in the ribs and they all pick up their trays and follow a resolute Rey in a short parade to the corner. She slaps her tray down in front of Ben, and he jumps and looks up.

“You’re sitting with us,” she informs him. He doesn’t have time to say anything before Rose, Poe, and Finn claim their seats at the table, talking and laughing.

Rey doesn’t talk much rest the of the meal, and neither does Ben. But she looks up at him and catches him smiling into his soup at something Finn said. Rey smiles too.

* * *

He partners her for the rest of the term. Nothing is said about switching them up. Students and staff alike seem to take it for granted: when there’s partnering to be done, Ben will be with Rey. When his hands are supporting her, she looks in the mirror and she sees someone good enough to be in the company. But when she watches him dance alone, she wonders if she’s fooling herself: if it’s the just the effect of his partnering that makes her seem better than she is. Anyone would look just as good with him.

She works even harder. Her muscles scream with the effort, but she pushes her body right up to edge of what it says it can’t handle. She doesn’t go beyond, because that’s a recipe for injury, but she shoves the fenceposts over, little by little, at the cost of sweat and smiling strain.

He barely sweats. It’s something she notices early on. She can be in a leotard dripping with it, and he’s wearing a pristine white tee-shirt and the only sweat on his body is a slight sheen on his forehead and hers wetting his hands.

She goes back and forth between frustration with him and with herself. Because he’s still obnoxiously perfect without trying, but he’s shy and quiet and when he smiles, it’s at her. So she doesn’t _not_ like him.

“When I get into the company,” she pants one day after class, jabbing him in the chest, “it’s not going to be because of you. It’s going to be because I’m good.”

“I know,” he answers quietly.

“You better,” she growls.

“I do.”

* * *

They both get their contracts on a Friday afternoon, a month after her seventeenth birthday. Her appointment is after his. He waits in the hall for her outside the artistic director’s office.

She runs into his arms and wraps her arms around his neck, and he picks her up automatically. Her feet kick with glee as she buries her nose in his neck. “Why did you wait for me?” she scolds, grinning. “This would’ve been so awkward if I hadn’t gotten it.”

“I knew you would.” He hasn’t put her down, so her feet dangle. He could hold her like this all day, probably. Eye to eye.

“You can’t have known for sure.”

“I did.” He smiles quietly.

“How?”

“Because you told me.”

It’s a while longer before her feet touch the ground again.

* * *

She finds the first flower in the mirror the next morning. Just a bud. It’s a few inches below her collarbone, right over her heart. She covers her mouth and grins.

She double- and triple-checks to make sure her leotard covers it. She can hardly wait until the evening, when she can look again. She examines it closely. It’s blooming. She thinks it’s a lilac. It’s bright pink, like his cheeks when she smiles at him.

So _this_ is what love feels like.

* * *

He double- and triple-checks in the mirror. No flowers. Just skin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please forgive the liberties I am taking and will continue to take with the UK’s Royal Ballet School and Royal Ballet. No similarities to actual dancers or staff are intended. I based my description of Ben’s physicality on Royal Ballet First Artist [Joseph Sissens](http://www.roh.org.uk/people/joseph-sissens), because _come on:_


	2. Wilting

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please look at this [gorgeous art](https://twitter.com/musical_milk_/status/1316515418698285056) that [Mia](https://twitter.com/musical_milk_) made for the fic! 🥰
> 
> Note for this chapter: I’ve taken some pretty big liberties with how quickly Rey and Ben are promoted—it’s almost unheard of for two dancers to both join the company one year and be promoted the next two years in a row. Feel free to read about the Royal Ballet’s ranks [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Royal_Ballet#Structure).
> 
> I’ve never been in the professional ballet world, but I do know a moderate amount about it. My apologies to anyone who knows enough to spot inaccuracies!

She wants to say something to him, but she doesn’t know how. If she wears a leotard whose cut lets him see the cluster of lilacs blooming on her chest, that would mean that other people could see it too, and she doesn’t want that. She doesn’t even know if she wants him to know. What if he doesn’t have any? Or what if he does, but they’re not for her? What if there are pansies on his skin, or roses?

Besides, it’s not a good time. They’re both starting with the company; their focus needs to be on assimilating. They’re on the bottom rung of a new ladder, and they’ll need all their energy to hang on, let alone climb.

She buys a dozen high-necked leotards: the sleeveless ones that snap closed at the nape of the neck. That way, even if the flowers spread, they’ll stay hidden. She practically lives in leotards, anyway, and there’s always stage makeup to cover them up for performances. It’ll be fine. As long as they don’t spread to her back.

A month into the fall season, the repetiteur singles her out for being out of line in a corps scene during rehearsal. Ben holds her in his apartment that evening as she cries and tells him _I wasn’t meant for this, it’s too much, I can’t do it, I’m not good enough._

 _You’re wonderful, you’re perfect, you’re the best dancer I know,_ he tells her. She laughs wetly and tells him he works with some of the best dancers in the world, she’s clearly not the best, and he tells her he can’t for the life of him think of a single one who’s better. She giggles and they roll out their muscles and cook dinner and eat it sitting on the floor by the coffee table and play Uno. He tries to let her win, but he wins accidentally because he keeps drawing +4 cards. She screeches in protest and pelts him with cards and laughs until her stomach hurts.

When she wakes up the next morning, the lilacs cover her left breast.

They’re paired with other dancers now, of course. Rey doesn’t like it. No one knows her body quite as well as he does. No one else can predict when she’s about to lean off balance before she does and compensate accordingly. She doesn’t feel quite as secure in anyone else’s hands—like she can give herself over to the movement with abandon and trust that exactly what her partner needs to do will be done. The other men don’t know the perfect height to put their lower supporting hand for her shoulder’s best line. Ben does.

She works hard that first year. They both do. To fit in with the company, to learn the repertory, to prove that they’re worthy of being paid to do this thing that they’d hitherto paid to do. (Well, most people paid. Ben had always been on scholarship. Because if you can get Ben Solo to come to your ballet school, you sure as hell don’t make him pay.)

She doesn’t have time to think too much about the sprays of purple, white, pink, and blue that spread over her breasts. She looks in the mirror and traces them with her finger sometimes, marveling at how real they look. She half expects to feel their miniature petals underneath her fingertip, but instead she just feels skin. Her nipples pebble at the thought of _his_ hand on them. She hopes he likes lilacs.

They learns the corps repertory and pay their dues. They each get a couple of pas de quatres: a way to prove themselves. To test out the fresh blood alongside soloists and see if they can keep up. Rey doesn’t know who she tries harder to best: the other women, Ben, or herself. Ben makes it look easy. Even the principals eye him admiringly in company class. During grand allegro, he slouches in the corner farthest from the piano until it’s his turn to go across the floor. Then his body transforms to brazen self-assurance, and that twinkle in his eye as he soars through the air precedes a little toss of the head as he lands in a deep kneeling lunge, as if he just danced Basilio to a full opera house. She tingles as she watches him. It’s a heady mixture of admiration and envy and desire and pure physical thrill of watching dance as he does it. When it’s her group’s turn and she steps forward, weight on the ball of her foot, poised for flight, she grins at herself in the mirror and raises her chin an inch and dares herself to rival him. She almost does, sometimes.

Their first year with the company flies by in a haze of sore muscles and jumbled choreography. The flowers start creeping down toward her navel. She touches them and smiles and waits.

The next season, they’re cast together in a small pas de deux. Rey makes him practice it with her every spare moment they have, because if they don’t wow everyone it won’t be for lack of rehearsal. It’s simple and sweet and pastoral, and their characters have nothing to feel but sunny delight. It feels right to have his hands on her again. His muscles haven’t forgotten her body. They rehearse a hundred times and then a hundred more, until their pas is a perfect polished gem, and it gleams on that big stage and Rey’s character’s joy is just Rey’s. They’re in the opening night cast, and the Telegraph’s review spares a glowing half a sentence for them, and Rey pounds on Ben’s door at six o’clock in the morning so they can go find somewhere that still sells physical newspapers and carefully cut out their line. Ben has no paste except an old dried-out glue stick in the back of a drawer, so he painstakingly rolls half-centimeter circles of tape so Rey can stick it to a piece of paper, not quite straight. She keeps meaning to frame it, but she never gets around to it, so it leans against her kitchen backsplash and collects drops of water and tomato sauce. He even brings over a frame, one Sunday, but they go for a frigid walk and come back and make tea to warm their red, running noses, and they’re so busy talking and laughing and dozing on the rug that they forget to frame it.

She’s friendly with the other corps dancers, but not really friends with any of them. She should make more of an effort. But it seems like so much work when she has Ben.

The lilacs touch her collarbones.

The end of the season draws near, and she knows he’ll be promoted to first artist. They probably thought about promoting him last year. He’s a lock. He’ll likely start getting more featured roles, and even some solos thrown in, and maybe next year or the year after that he’ll be promoted to soloist, and she’s happy for him but she hates it: the thought of him having another partner. There aren’t official partnerships, in the company. No two soloists or principal dancers are always paired together. But there are those pairs of people who simply _work_ together, in a way that feels deeper than years-old familiarity with each other’s bodies. Those pas de deux that seem like you’re watching two halves of the same entity, as if they share a brain and have decided to deploy it for the purpose of the most spine-tinglingly seamless dance in the world. Time doesn’t exist for a while. Neither does breathing. Then the music ends and time resumes and you think oh, _that’s_ what dance is. That’s what humans are capable of. Thank you for showing me.

She’d rather he not have that at all, than have it with someone else. And she hates herself for the thought.

When the director calls her into his office and tells her he’s promoting her to the first artist, she can barely keep from sobbing with relief until she makes it out to the hallway. Ben is waiting for her, again. She’s crying so hard he thinks something is wrong, and she buries her face in his chest and sobs out the lifted dread until she can speak clearly enough to tell him. He takes her out to dinner to celebrate. They get far too dressed up for the little Greek place around the corner, but their faces are softly lit by the votive candle that the grandfatherly proprietor plops down on the table for them, and Ben eats her olives even though he doesn’t like them either because he knows she doesn’t like to let food go to waste, and when she wakes up the next morning the lilacs make a full ring around her navel.

She thinks about him when she touches herself. At the end of the day after she’s showered and let her hair down, she doesn’t dry off. She pads to the bathroom sink naked and watches the drops run down her lilacs. She looks at herself in a mirror all day, but not with her hair down. Not like this. She teases her nipples gently and they perk up and ask for more. So she runs her towel over her skin slowly, sensually, letting the wetness gather between her legs as it leaves her skin. The lilacs jump as her abs clench, imagining him and her and two fields of flowers pressed together. She wants that very badly. But instead she scurries to her bed and makes do with a hand planted on the mattress so she can thrust down onto two fingers and pretend it’s him. It’s woefully, laughably inadequate compared to his warmth and his smell and his cock. But she can imagine, and she can bury her face in the pillow and cry out as her hips buck wildly and her muscles try to milk her fingers. They yield nothing. His cock would—he would groan as he spent inside her and she would smile tiredly and collapse on him and his lilacs would bloom right before her eyes, he would love her so much. It’s impossible, of course, but that’s what she likes to imagine.

They’re cast in another pas de deux in the fall of the new season. This one is sharp-edged, and she doesn’t have to act to summon the fire her eyes need. His dark scowl and his demanding hands electrify her, and then they take a break and suddenly he’s her Ben again, and she’s not surprised when her lilacs start creeping around her sides toward her back. They rehearse all the time again, because they still have something to prove, and she wonders if she ever won’t have something to prove. Their first performance causes a minor sensation. “Dripping with sex and brashly confident beyond their years,” one breathless review proclaims, “this nineteen-year-old duo reminded the rapt audience what passion looks like.” The next performance when they dance the role, the box office is up 10%. Then 20%. Someone makes a bootleg recording of them and within 24 hours, there’s a fan account on Instagram. They have to endure some good-natured ribbing from the rest of the company, but they’re cast together as Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf in the winter, just before Rey turns twenty, and she has to pinch herself because it all feels too soon, too perfect—too much like her wildest dreams come to life.

They’re both promoted to soloist that spring. Rey reels. Ben takes it in stride, or seems to, anyway, for her benefit. She couldn’t do it if not for him. His steady hands, and the solidity of his arm wrapped around her thigh, and the way she can whip herself into a turn or hurl herself into the air and know beyond certainty that he’ll catch her.

She finds the first lilac budding on her bicep that fall. Her first reaction is an electric thrill of fear. She should tell him, shouldn’t she? Because doesn’t this mean... She doesn’t have the words. She buys leotards with sleeves that reach her elbows, and she dabs concealer carefully down the slit in the back so he can’t see how her spine is a garden path. Not until she figures out how to say it.

“Mmph,” she swallows a gulp of water as he comes out of the bathroom where she’s walking down the hall. “Come have lunch with me.”

“I can’t,” he says regretfully, “I have a fitting for that shirt they’re altering.”

She rolls her eyes playfully. “The costume people should know your body by now.”

He smiles. “They don’t spend as much time touching it as you do.”

“Hey,” she lectures with a pointed finger, “I’ll have you know that it’s my _job_ to touch you. I’m a _professional.”_

He grins. “Go to the cafeteria, I’ll meet you there after.”

She shrugs. “Nah, I’ll just come with you. It’s on the way.” She takes another swig of water.

“No, Rey, you don’t need to—”

“No trouble.” She flashes him a smile, and his train of thought seems to falter. “Here we are!” She pulls open the door with one hand and gestures him in grandly with the other. “Monsieur.”

She doesn’t know why he hesitates, until they get to the fitting area and it occurs to her exactly what this fitting will entail. He’s going to take off his shirt.

What if he has fewer lilacs than her? Or what if he has more? This shouldn’t be how she finds out, should it? They should be in her bed, with the lamp on, so she can see all of his flowers to kiss them. It’s too intimate a thing to find out at noon on a Tuesday in the costume department. Her feet won’t move, though. Ben looks at her pleadingly and tries to stall as long as he can, but the costume staff have a schedule to keep, and she _needs_ to know; it’s been _four years._

He pulls his shirt over his head and fumbles with the costume. His thumbs can’t quite hook into the hem, so she gets a long view of his back in front of her and his chest in the mirror. It’s actually probably not that long, really, just a few seconds, but it’s also an eternity.

Because his skin is entirely blank. He doesn’t love her after all.

Her feet finally move. They don’t take her to the cafeteria, though. They take her to the farthest stall of the closest bathroom, where she can crouch against the wall and press her fist to her open mouth so they can’t hear her sobs.

* * *

The flowers don’t die. That’s the worst part. Why isn’t the knowledge that he doesn’t love her enough to make her stop loving him?

The trails of lilacs on her arms mock her. Why? Why _her?_ How did the universe get it so wrong?

He’s even more solicitous of her than before. He always wants to make sure she’s safe, she’s not hurt, she’s comfortable, she’s okay. _Why?_ she longs to scream. _Why do you care, if you don’t love me?_

Except she knows that he loves her. It’s in the way he makes a double batch of her favorite lentil vegetable stew and drops it off on her doormat so she doesn’t need to see him. It’s in the way he goes to the pointe shoe storage room every week to sew her ribbons and elastic on because he knows she always pricks her fingers. It’s in the way his eyes flash with pride when she sticks a quadruple pirouette. Their bodies still know each other, and his hands speak clearly. Of course he loves her. He’s just not _in_ love with her.

That hurts even more.

* * *

That spring Rey turns twenty-one, and two of the company members get married, and everyone is invited. As the bride appears at the end of the aisle there’s an audible gasp at the peonies that dot her chest, shoulders, and upper arms, making dainty red short sleeves for her sleeveless white dress. She’d never shown them before. They didn’t know just how much she loved him until today, with her peonies clasped in her hands and spilling over onto her arms. The ceremony is a blur.

The waiter keeps refilling Rey’s glass at the reception, so she keeps drinking. Ben isn’t seated at her table. That’s good.

At midnight, she’s standing alone at the far edge of the tent with her champagne glass in her bare feet, because her shoes were too wobbly. She hovers between light and dark: the fairy light glow of the tent and the unknown garden night beyond. She watches them dance and be in love. _Peonies._ She takes a swig.

She hardly notices Ben until he’s right next to her. “Rey,” he says, with a nervous tension that she doesn’t like, “Can I talk to you about something?”

“Did you know,” she jabs a finger at him, “that only one in ten hundred people have flowers not jus’ on their torso?” She hiccups. “’S true.”

“I think you mean ten thousand.”

“Tha’s what I said.”

“Yes, I did know that.”

“She must love ‘im a lot.” She drinks.

“She must.”

The opaque fabric of her elbow-length sleeves chafes.

He takes a shaky breath. “Can we talk? In private? In the garden?”

 _No. I don’t want to hear why you don’t love me._ “I would _never_ marry someone from the company.” She shakes her head vehemently. “Never, never.”

She keeps watching the couple, not him, so she can’t see his face, but his voice is oddly strained. “Why’s that?”

“Because what if you break up? And still have to work together? What if they’re your partner and it ruins things?” She shakes her head again. “Dancing’s more important.” She takes a sip of champagne. “Dumb. They’re dumb. For falling in love. Too messy.”

“Do you really think that?”

It’s not the champagne talking, it’s the memory of his bare chest. “Yes. Really.” She doesn’t look at him; she can’t bear it.

His voice is tight. “Oh. Rey, I... Never mind.”

She sways on her feet, and he steadies her with his unerring hands.

“Let’s get you home.”

She slumps, suddenly exhausted. “I’m tired. Ben. Everything’s hard. It’s hard.”

His arm wraps securely around her waist, and his breath is hot against her temple. “Believe me, I know.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading and for all your love! 💛


	3. Waiting

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My little fic has been blessed with more [art](https://twitter.com/musical_milk_/status/1317257921386991616?s=20)! And a [moodboard](https://twitter.com/adambsolodriver/status/1317876420073369602?s=20)! And another [moodboard](https://twitter.com/saourise/status/1318173372979826688?s=20)! Reylos are simply the best. ❤️
> 
> Two real ballets feature in this chapter: Romeo & Juliet and Don Quixote. I invite you to watch the clips of the dances described here if you’re interested!  
> [Romeo and Juliet balcony pas de deux](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zXfYygXX0I)  
> [Don Quixote Act I finale](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fKxzQ8ARTQ)

They’re cast in principal roles more often than not, even though they’re only soloists. The cynical part of her brain tells Rey that it’s because they sell tickets; if not for their audience, they wouldn’t have come nearly so far so quickly. Well, _she_ wouldn’t have.

That voice in the back of her head only quiets when they’re dancing together. Because of course he makes her look better, but she does the same for him too, somehow. Like he’s even more alive when his hands are on her—like together they’re more than the sum of their individual talent.

They’re cast in Romeo and Juliet that next season when they’re twenty-two. Playing a lovestruck teenager is less of a stretch for her than it is for him, she thinks ruefully. But his acting skill more than makes up for his lack of real-world experience from which to draw, and she falls in love with him a little more every night when he bounds across the shadowy stage to her as she watches from her balcony.

The first time he kisses her is in a rehearsal studio, in front two coaches. She could scream at how convincing his acting is: the moment of trembling hesitation, the way he takes her waist to raise her up on pointe before he cradles her neck with his hand and kisses her with the tender promise of a real passion and follows her lips with his when she pulls away, like he truly doesn’t want to stop.

It doesn’t count as him kissing her; it’s Romeo kissing Juliet. They could still have a real first kiss one day. That’s what she tells herself that night as the tears seep into her pillow.

Maybe he’s asexual. Or aromantic. Maybe both. Maybe the universe screwed up monumentally and that’s why she has all these extra flowers, enough that they spill off her torso: because she got the lilacs that would’ve been his too. He got the friend love, and she got all the romantic, sexual love. But she got the friend love too.

Or maybe he’s not asexual or aromantic at all—maybe she’s just not lovable in that way. Maybe that’s why he’s always so kind to her: as a silent _sorry_ for the fact that there’s some essential piece missing from her that keeps her from being loved. Being wanted.

She considers dating. Her schedule isn’t exactly conducive to it, though, and it’s not like she knows people outside of the company. She would have to ask to be set up with someone or try online dating. Neither prospect sounds entirely pleasant, but she thinks seriously about it, which is more than she’s ever done before. She’d like to hold hands with someone and be cuddled and desired, even if she can’t be loved. She’d like to have sex.

She knows deep down that she’s not going to. Because who would want to sleep with someone who’s covered in another man’s flowers?

She works even harder. She has trouble sleeping. When she wakes up too early and can’t get back to sleep, she dresses and goes to the studio. Sometimes she gets in three hours before anyone else arrives.

She covers up the dark circles under her eyes, but Ben can tell. He can always tell. On their day off, he invites her over and puts on a movie and sits in his armchair so she can stretch out on the couch. She knows what he’s doing, and she stubbornly tries to resist. She _won’t_ fall asleep.

When she wakes up, the DVD menu is playing on repeat and she’s covered in a blanket. He’s cutting up broccoli on the wood cutting board instead of the glass one even though it’s harder to clean, because the glass one would have woken her up.

She pretends to be asleep for another minute so she can wipe her eyes without him seeing.

He serves her sauteed greens and quinoa salad and grilled salmon.

“We should have other friends,” she says as she eats. “It shouldn’t just be us, all the time. We should each have our own friends, that we hang out with.”

“Oh.” His Adam’s apple bobs. “Does Rose count?”

“You talk to Rose?” she asks quickly, fork suspended on its way to her mouth.

“Sometimes we get breakfast,” he says gruffly.

“She’s all the way across town.”

“Yeah.” He takes a drink of water.

“Oh.” She takes her bite and swallows. “That’s good.”

The air is thick with words she doesn’t say.

On their next day off, when he asks if she wants to do something, she tells him she’s busy.

* * *

When they’re twenty-three, a guest choreographer creates a new piece on them. In Bloom, it’s called. It has a loose story about a couple of soulmates at three stages of their relationship, with ensemble dances in between to depict the passage of time. Their first pas de deux is the youthful exuberance of new love. The second is tempestuous: their love has grown with time, but it doesn’t stop them from clashing. The third is the full maturity of love. Wise, calm, and steady. Assured and unshakeable.

The first is the easiest, emotionally if not physically. Sprinkled with pas de chats in perfect unison and airy lifts that make her forget that she can’t fly. Their characters are lightly optimistic, heedless of life’s challenges. Because they’re soulmates, after all, and they found each other, so what have they to fear?

The choreographer and costume designer spell out their joint vision to the two of them at the end of the fifth rehearsal. Rey is wiping the sweat from her face and neck and Ben is standing there not wiping sweat because he doesn’t have any. Their costumes will be simple: Ben in opaque tights, and Rey in a strapless leotard and bare legs. The most complicated part is the flowers.

Their flowers will spread over time, from just a sprig during the first pas de deux to a whole chestful for the third. The costume designer isn’t sure yet how she’ll apply them between scenes: whether a kind of temporary tattoo or a series of three sheer tops that will be invisible onstage except for the flowers. They haven’t decided what kind of flowers, either—just that they’ll have them. As they explain, Rey nods and drinks her water and avoids looking at Ben.

She traces her flowers in the mirror for a long time that night. They’ve spread to the small of her back by now. She runs her fingers over them and thinks about how nothing the designer devises will be as beautiful as these lilacs of hers.

She covers her torso with makeup and goes to the first costume fitting stone-faced. The stick-on tattoos the designer tries out don’t adhere well on the makeup. The designer doesn’t ask, and Rey is grateful. The sheer sleeveless top goes under her leotard, so the flowers spill out onto her chest. They don’t cover nearly as far as Rey’s do.

Sunflowers.

She watches herself in the fitting room mirror. These could’ve been hers, maybe, if Ben had never left Copenhagen. If she’d met someone else instead. If the universe hadn’t messed up so horrifically badly.

She doesn’t recognize herself in the sunflowers, though. She washes off her makeup that night and looks at herself in her bathroom mirror and try as she might, she can’t bring herself to wish for anything but her lilacs and him. She comes with her nightshirt twisted around her waist and his name bitter-sweet on her lips.

There’s a look in his eyes that she doesn’t recognize when he sees her for the first time in costume, with the flowers. She thought knew every look of his by now. Apparently not.

The third pas de deux is the hardest: mature love. The movements are clean and simple, with none of the sprightly effervescence of the first pas or the violent, whirling tension of the second. In the third, there’s nothing to hide behind. She needs to bring her whole heart and put it in her outstretched hands and hold it out to him cradled by the unswerving certainty that he’ll take it and give her another back. And then the music ends and she puts her heart back in her chest and pretends that it was all make-believe, but hearts bleed, and she leaves blood on that stage. Not the kind you can slip in.

She gets armfuls of bouquets too big to hold. She plops them on her dressing room counter, and they take up so much room they nearly cover the corner of the picture frame sticking out beneath them. She pulls it out.

It’s their first review, crooked on its page. With the water splashes and pasta sauce and all. She searches the whole room for a note, but he didn’t leave one. She takes off her shoes and costume and peels the sunflowers off and looks at herself in the mirror. Purple smudges peek through the places where her makeup has rubbed off. They look like bruises.

She wonders if there’s a single inch of her body that his hands haven’t touched.

The what ifs keep her awake at night. What if his flowers have grown. What if he had some even then and he’d covered them up. What if they’re both waiting for the other to say it. What if they wait forever and never get to love each other out loud. What if he truly has no flowers and she’s deluding herself. What if she says her love and it ruins their partnership. What if he never dances with her again. What if the two of them on that stage is really as momentous and irreplicable as it feels, and she dances another twenty years waiting to find again what they have every single night, and she never does, not even once.

Sometimes he makes faces at her in the mirror to make her laugh.

She makes friends with a new first artist named Kay who scrunches her nose up whenever anyone has occasion to say her full first name: Kaydel. “Too stuffy,” she says. “Who needs two whole syllables? I’m not the bloody queen.” Rey listens to her and thinks about the girl who slapped her lunch tray down on Ben’s table. She wonders what happened to that girl. She hopes she’s doing well.

She texts Rose every once in a while, and Finn too. They’re both at English National Ballet. It’s less than an hour’s bus ride away, but it feels farther. Everything outside her small bubble does. Rose never mentions having breakfast with Ben. It was easier when they were all around the same table, and Poe too. _Everything_ was easier then, though if Rey could have told her sixteen-year-old self she never would’ve believed her. “You got into the company,” she’d say. “You’re a soloist. You danced _Juliet._ I’d give _anything_ to dance Juliet.”

 _You’ll have to,_ Rey would tell her. Or maybe she wouldn’t. Let her keep believing as long as she could that life was a corps de ballet contract with _happily ever after_ written on the bottom. Turn it over before you sign it, though, because there’s fine print on the back, too small to read. Or maybe it’s just sketches of lilacs.

Sometimes in class or rehearsal she watches him when he doesn’t know she is. His boyish, open face, earnest in concentration. Determined to get everything right for them. It’s physically impossible to feel the flowers growing. That’s what they say.

She’s pretty sure they’re wrong.

* * *

She’s only half listening one day over lunch in the lounge when Kay is talking about a date she’s been trying to plan for a couple weeks. “And then he asked if I was free on _Saturday evening.”_ She scoffs. “Sure, no problem. A _Saturday_ in _December,_ I have no plans whatsoever.”

Rey hums sympathetically, scraping the bottom of her yogurt cup.

“I swear,” Kay concludes, “you are _so_ lucky.”

“What?” Rey asks. “Why?”

“I mean, Ben gets it. The hours you work. You two basically have the exact same schedule anyway.”

Rey sets down the empty cup. “What do you mean? What does Ben have to do with anything?”

“Well, because you’re...” Kay waves her fork in what’s evidently intended to be a significant gesture. “You know.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Rey says, confused.

“Oh, sorry, I thought we were close enough... I mean, I know you don’t like to be open about it in public or whatever...”

“I genuinely feel like you and I are having two different conversations right now.”

“Because you and Ben are,” she leans forward and dramatically whispers, _“together.”_

“We’re not,” Rey says automatically.

“Sure, of course,” Kay says, winking.

Her hands feel cold. “No, I mean it. Ben and I aren’t...involved. We never have been.”

“Wait, you’re being serious?”

Rey wipes her palms on her warm-up pants. “Yeah. Wait, who told you we were?”

 _“Told_ me?” Kay gapes. “I mean, no one had to tell me. We’ve all seen the two of you together.”

“We work well together. It’s just because we’re good as partners.”

Kay puts her fork down and plants her palms on the table. “Let me get this straight. You and Ben have been dancing together for, what? Eight years? And you’ve been denying your feelings that _whole time?”_

“Shh,” Rey reproves. “Don’t be silly.” She picks at one thumbnail with the other. “I don’t have any feelings for Ben. Besides friendship. Obviously. We’re friends.”

Kay tilts her head skeptically. “If I had a _friend_ in the company who looked at me like Ben looks at you, I wouldn’t have to try to schedule this impossible date during Nutcracker season.”

“He doesn’t look at me any particular way. And even if he did, it wouldn’t matter. Because I don’t have feelings for him. Except as friends.”

Kay shakes her head disbelievingly. “I feel like I have to rearrange my entire mental picture of you now. I thought you were going home and making sweet love to that man, and you _had_ to crush my dream like that. Dear God. All that tension between you builds up without an outlet? You’re going to explode one day. Or he is.”

Rey checks the clock. Ten minutes until her next rehearsal. She starts gathering her things. “No one’s exploding. Especially not me. _Or_ him. Or me.”

“This is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me,” Kay concludes dramatically. “And it’s not even happening to _me,_ per se. Oh, Rey.” She heaves a sigh.

“Just friends!” Rey calls over her shoulder on her way to the recycling bin. When she turns to look where she’s going, she almost bumps into Ben’s chest.

She doesn’t know if the look that flashes across his face is physical pain or something else, but it’s gone before she can decipher it. She looks him up and down to make sure he’s in one piece.

“Are you okay?”

“What? Yeah. Of course.”

“Great. Come practice that new lift with me.”

He does. If he happens to talk or smile less the rest of the day, it’s probably just because he’s tired. It is Nutcracker season, after all.

* * *

She turns twenty-five. It feels like it should mean something. It doesn’t. Just another year.

They dance Don Quixote that March. It’s the first thing they’ve done in a while that doesn’t feel fraught with something. Just two carefree young lovers whose greatest concern is hightailing it out of town to escape the foppish nobleman with the gold buckled shoes. There aren’t any pesky feelings to get in the way of the steps. And it’s just as well, because the choreography is the most taxing they’ve done yet. Even Ben breaks the very mildest of sweats. But he practically radiates energy, and the man who was the green, untried teenager with Basilio’s brashness _is_ Basilio now. They wink and kiss and flirt, and she really is flirting with Basilio. And when she nails her traveling pirouettes and sticks that last relevé attitude, muscling it for half a second longer than her body thinks it should be able to, it’s Basilio who grins at her with pride as she bounds offstage, and if every show is like this, they can do this for the next twenty years, no problem. Fouettés are easy compared to feelings.

The end of the season approaches, and with it comes the question of a possible promotion to first soloist. Rey doesn’t really care either way.

She dreams of a sixteen-year-old with fire in her heart and in her pointe shoes and wakes up crying. She wonders if this is all adulthood is: accumulating more past to mourn.

She grieves her ambition. When she had everything in the world to prove and a chip on her shoulder the size of a log. Now she doesn’t want for anything more than the next performance after this one, the next chance to dance with him. _He’s_ her only ambition, and she’s even given up on that. She puts her bathrobe on before she looks in the bathroom mirror now. The lilacs are still there, but they mean about as much as if she’d gone to a tattoo parlor and gotten them done in the course of a few afternoons. They just happen to be on her skin.

She finds a comfortable groove in life and settles in.

She starts texting Rose more often, and Finn. She and Kay try to make sushi and fail spectacularly (how is it possible for sticky rice to be _too_ sticky?) and eat the ingredients instead and laugh until they cry. Spring arrives, reluctant and rainy, and she puts on her mac and wellies and takes the underground to the end of the line and walks for miles. When her phone buzzes a text alert, she smiles. She has _people_ now, not just _person,_ and she has herself besides. Some change is good.

Kay doesn’t mean to gossip, Rey knows. She’s just so talkative and full of information that it flows out of her sometimes. Nothing mean-spirited. Rey knows more than she ever thought she would about the director’s baby’s teething process and the supposed flirtation between the costume mistress and the principal wig dresser. Most of it is sweet and fun and nothing: just texture of the life of the company.

When Kay mentions Ben’s standing job offer with the Paris Opera Ballet, it’s offhand. Like it’s common knowledge. Rey forgets how to breathe for a moment and has to re-teach her lungs.

“Whoa, Rey, are you okay? You look pale. I have an energy bar, how’s your blood sugar?”

“I’m fine.”

“Seriously, you’re white as a sheet.” Kay rummages through her bag.

“What did you say? About Ben?”

“What?” Kay asks distractedly, sifting through legwarmers and spools of tape. “Paris Opera. You know.”

“No,” Rey says quietly. “I don’t.”

Kay stops shuffling through dance miscellany and looks straight at her. “Oh. I thought you knew. I thought everyone knew.”

“I don’t,” she repeats.

“It was a year ago, I think, maybe two. They asked him to come be a soloist. It doesn’t sound like it was said in so many words, but there was kind of a winking implication that he’d get principal in a year or two.”

“What did he say?”

Kay shrugs. “He’s still here, isn’t he?”

Rey nods and forces a smile. She goes to rehearsal and he knows something is off with her, she can tell, because they always know when something is off with the other. He wouldn’t have _that_ in Paris. At least to begin with. Until he learned to read a new partner as well as he reads her.

She stops him in the hall after. “Why didn’t you tell me about Paris?”

“What about it?”

She scowls. “Don’t play dumb. Their offer.”

He shrugs. “I told them no.”

She fiddles with the cap on her water bottle. “You could’ve been a principal by now if you’d gone.”

His shoulders sag, just a hair. “What is this, Rey? Are you saying you wanted me to leave?”

“No,” she says quickly. “But it’s...something. That they want you that much. You can’t tell me you haven’t been tempted.”

“I haven’t been tempted.”

She scoffs. “Ben.”

“Rey,” he retorts, seriously. “Why would I go to Paris, when my partner is here?”

Her eyes drop to her bottle. “There are other partners.” She scrapes the edge with her thumbnail.

He doesn’t answer, for long enough that she looks up at him. There’s a silent war going on in his throat, she thinks. Between what he wants to say and what he’s going to say. Finally he decides. “I already know how to make your favorite kind of stew,” he says lightly. “I’d have to learn someone else’s. _Way_ too much work.”

She doesn’t smile. “You don’t have to cook for me. Or sew my shoes.”

“Yes, I do.”

She looks up at him and clutches her water bottle to her chest and thinks that there’s something too intimate about this conversation for the hallway, where just anyone can see. It’s in what they don’t say. “You should go to Paris if you want to.”

A muscle in his jaw jumps. “What are you saying?”

“That you should go to Paris if you want to.”

He stares at her for a second too long. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

She looks down. “Good.”

They would scarcely be farther apart if he were in Paris than they are now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Final chapter tomorrow. 💛


	4. Blooming

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am so extraordinarily touched by the response, creativity, and art this fic has inspired. Thank you. ❤️  
> [Ben and Rey’s flowers](https://twitter.com/SophyAlcachofi/status/1319463853151952902)  
> [Running piggyback ride](https://twitter.com/reylographer/status/1321026587161169920)  
> [Ballet manip and beautiful summary]()  
> [Ballet manip with quote](https://twitter.com/coexistantLilli/status/1319430402713382912?s=20)  
> [Quote illustrations](https://twitter.com/dyadskyberheart/status/1319678358142226435)  
> [Rey with press clippings](https://twitter.com/justsunshinerey/status/1319682070726250498)  
> [Dreamy ballet moodboard](https://twitter.com/reylomyhalo/status/1321182070710960137)  
> [Bound book](https://twitter.com/omgreylo/status/1320857297816485888) 🥺

They’re not allowed to come in on their day off. It’s a recipe for burnout. She starts doing it anyway that May. Something about this particular spring seeps into her bones and makes her restless. She feels like she’s teetering on the edge of something. She doesn’t like it.

She comes in the evening, often, after a day of agitation. She pulls on her tights and a habitual high-necked, elbow-length sleeved leotard and some street clothes, and she throws her ballet shoes and purse in a bag. She especially likes to come when there’s a performance so the rehearsal rooms are vacant. She slips into one and doesn’t switch the lights on, just does barre to the one emergency light in the corner that’s always on. It helps. Not the movement so much as the being alone in the studio. Walking alone through the sparsely lit hallways. This is how it should be. Just her and this place that’s her home. It’s all she needs.

One night she’s not alone, though. She does her barre and picks up her bag and is on her way to the dressing room and happens to see Ben, in another studio, doing the same thing. Just him and the emergency light.

When she was in school, occasionally the teachers would let the students come stand in a studio doorway and watch the principals rehearse. So that everyone could see, some people sat in the front and the rest crowded around the back to watch. They didn’t make a sound, for fear that the slightest cough would distract their idols. They watched Odettes and Giselles and Juliets and dreamed dreams as big as only children’s dreams can be.

She’s not a child anymore. But she sets her bag down and sits quietly down in the shadows of the hallway beyond the open doorway and wraps her arms around her knees and watches, without making a sound.

She’s never seen him dance all alone like this. There’s a looseness, a freedom. None of the bravado, but all of the skill. Pure and freer than usual, because he’s deploying it for himself alone—for the sheer physical sensation of movement. He turns and bends and jumps and it’s nothing she hasn’t seen from him before in various permutations a thousand times, but this feels different.

His shirt isn’t quite skintight. It billows out slightly when he turns, and the hem floats up when he jumps. He goes to the barre and glances around quickly. She shrinks smaller into her nigh-invisible shadowy ball. He doesn’t see her. He takes his shirt off and drapes it over the wood.

She gets shakily to her feet before she knows she’s done it.

“Ben?” Her voice echoes feebly in the cavernous room.

He whirls around and grabs for the shirt, but it’s too late. She walks toward him in a trance. He stands under the single light like a stunned deer, helpless in the face of her.

These are no delicate swirls, no wisps of petals. Every inch of him is covered. Purple and pink and blue and white, bunched up and piled on, all for her. _All_ for her. His flowers stop in a severe line a couple inches above where the sleeves of his tee-shirt end, but no, they don’t. It’s makeup, of course. How far do they go? Down to his elbows? Down to his _hands?_ Do the flowers that cluster above his waistband extend down his thighs? Is that even possible?

He holds his shirt in one fist, not trying to hide. Letting her see as best she can by the limited light. She stops an arm’s reach away.

“Ben?” She sounds faraway and lost.

He doesn’t speak. His chest rises and falls with emotion, and the flowers do too.

She looks up at him. “You love me?” Her voice is very small.

He doesn’t answer her. He turns away and walks over to where his bag sits beneath the barre. He pulls out a clean rag, wets it with some solution from a bottle, and comes back. He hands it to her silently and holds out his arms, palms up.

She draws a shaking breath as she presses the rag to his bicep, where the stark line of makeup begins. She scrubs gently, and the false pallor dissolves. Each stroke reveals more. They crowd each other: throngs of lilacs. Bunches of love. They grow in a thick sleeve down his arm. Only his palm is bare. He turns his arm over, so she can rub the back of his hand and gasp at the delicate sprays that stretch onto each finger. She feels his eyes on her as heavy as a touch, but she doesn’t look up.

She does his other arm too, and the rag turns peach and all his lilacs appear. _Her_ lilacs, because they’re hers too. Just like hers belong to him. When she’s finished, she drops the rag on the floor and looks up at him.

“How long?” she whispers.

He swallows hard. “The day after I met you, my whole chest was covered. A week later, so was my back. They started growing thicker and thicker until they spilled over onto my arms, and they kept going. On my legs, too. There wasn’t enough room for it all. Nine years.” His inhale is a shudder. “Nine years. I loved you when I was sixteen, and I’ve loved you every day since then. Every day more, Rey, they don’t stop. They grow on top of each other.”

“You covered them up.”

He nods. “I went though a lot of makeup. I touched it up during the day whenever I could. It only worked because I hardly sweat.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Her whisper is fierce.

“I didn’t want to scare you away. It was...a lot. To be sixteen and have flowers on your arms. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t tell you right away, and then the longer I left it, the more they grew and the more impossible it became. Because what if you just had a few? And you saw mine and thought I was some sort of desperate... _freak?_ This isn’t just one in ten thousand, Rey.” He gestures to his arm. “This volume. This is one in a million, one in a _billion,_ I don’t know—some statistical impossibility. I didn’t want to scare you away,” he repeats helplessly.

Her voice is deathly quiet. “You should’ve told me.”

He swallows. “I was going to. At that wedding. When we were twenty-one. It was shit timing, I know. You hadn’t spoken to me in months, not really. Not since you saw me without my shirt. We hadn’t been _us._ And I couldn’t live like that, and I’d finally made up my mind that it was better to tell you and risk losing you than not tell you and live with you already lost. And then...” he trails off. The memory of that night swells between them.

“I was drunk.”

“I know.”

“I was just trying to protect myself. You shouldn’t have believed what I said.”

“I always believe you, Rey.”

Her eyes well with tears.

Her hands rise slowly to the back of her neck, where her leotard’s two buttons wait. She slides them open. She eases one arm out of the leotard, then the other. She pushes it down to her waist and looks up at him. His wide eyes trace her bare breasts, her shoulders, her arms. Their cascades of blooms.

“I don’t have quite as many as you,” she says just before the tears fall, “but I can grow more, Ben.”

She manages to get her arms around his neck before he wraps his around her middle and picks her up and starts sobbing. Her feet dangle, and she laughs through her tears. Because nothing in the world has ever been so right as this: her bare skin against his, and her flowers against his flowers. No more hiding. Just love.

He doesn’t put her down, so she starts kissing his cheek and jaw and neck and everywhere her lips can reach, and her cheek wipes his tears and his cheek wipes hers.

“It’s okay,” she murmurs in his ear, “We can be happy now.”

That makes him cry harder, and her body shakes with his sobs. So she wraps her legs around his waist and locks her feet at his back, and she holds herself up so his arms don’t need to.

She can’t make out the words at first, choked as they are by his tears. “I love you. I love you. I love you.” Maybe if they say it a hundred times it’ll be enough—for today, at least. They can say the next hundred tomorrow. She takes his and gives hers back until he’s stopped crying enough to start kissing her, and then when they say it it’s not in words. _I love you. I love you. I love you._

She thought she knew everything there was to know about his mouth. She knew a lot, certainly, but not this: the plumpness of his lips and the heady slide of his tongue on hers and the way he holds her neck with both hands and _devours_ her, and then stops to breathe and touch her cheek and look at her like he’s been blind his whole life until this moment and she’s the only thing he’s ever seen, and then he presses his mouth to hers again and she tightens her arms and her legs and holds on.

His lips move in a hot, wet trail to her neck, and she scoots up his body so he can bury his face there and she holds on to his hair and tries to breathe. “Ben,” she whispers, “you love me,” and she didn’t think it would sound so broken.

His arms fold around her again: one hot against her bare back and the other under her rear, supporting her weight. She wonders if he’ll ever put her down. She doesn’t think she could bear it.

“I thought I would never get to tell you.” His words are wet and muffled against her neck.

She cries and laughs at once in a violent hiccup-sob. “Don’t go to Paris.”

He tries to burrow further into the crook of her neck. “Never.”

She’s gripping his hair so tightly it must hurt. “Don’t leave me.”

He pulls back, leaving a kiss on her neck. He cradles her face in both hands and looks her straight in the eyes. “Rey. I will need you for the rest of the world.”

Something shifts between them as their eyes devour. She’s wrapped around him, skin to skin, but not enough, and not where she needs it. Where _they_ need it, because she can see it in his hot gaze and feel it in his trembling breath.

She unwraps her legs from around him and he holds her waist and lowers her to the ground as gently as the softest landing of the smoothest lift. She looks down and takes his hand in both of hers. She traces its blooms with a light touch. She raises his hand and interlaces her fingers with it, palm against palm. Then she lifts her hand, slowly pulling away, so his hand is left flat when she steps forward to press her bare breast against it. She looks up at him.

“Love me, Ben.”

His breath is torn ragged in strips of need, and his hand grasps at her, but he shakes his head resolutely. Why? She could push her leotard and tights down to her thighs, and he could pull down his tights and dance belt and he could be inside her in probably ten seconds. She could bend over and hold onto the barre and watch in the mirror as they’re joined, or he could pick her up again except this time with no clothes in the way, and those strong arms that have lifted her a thousand thousand times could do it a few dozen more, but different this time.

She presses her hand to the back of his, kneading it into her breast.

He pulls his hand away with supreme effort. “Wait.” She can see the sweat on his forehead now. His lips tremble as he kisses her lips and her forehead. “Wait, love. Wait until we get home.”

“Ben,” she whines pleadingly, plucking futilely at his bare chest, because her flowers prickle and _why_ is he not inside of her?

“I know, love.” He wipes his forehead with the back of his hand. “Where’s your shirt, Rey?”

She gestures to her bag in the hall. He bounds to get it, and she slips her leotard back on her shoulders with shaking hands. He returns and yanks out her shirt and she holds her hands out like he did for her, and she finds the sleeve holes and puts her arms up so he can tug it down onto her and kiss her when her head reemerges.

“Pants,” he pants, and he pulls them out of her bag too, and somehow they take breaks long enough between kissing and touching to put on enough clothes that it’s not entirely indecent for them to leave the studio, with his arm wrapped snuggly around her and her hands holding onto his wrist and the front of his jacket, because touching him is an imperative.

They manage to make their way out of the building without being seen by anyone or accidentally making love in the stairwell. It’s a fifteen-minute walk to his flat. It’s longer to hers. The next bus isn’t for another thirteen minutes. They stop by the bus stop to assess.

“Let’s run, Ben, please,” she turns to him to beg. She tightens the strap of her bag across her chest.

“You’re wearing clogs, love, you’ll turn your ankle.”

“I don’t care about my ankle,” she huffs stubbornly, and he laughs.

“You’re going to care tomorrow.” He kisses her hand, already interlaced with his.

“There is no tomorrow,” she pleads, stroking his chest.

He enfolds her in his arms. “I’ve never believed that more than right now,” he breathes.

 _“Ben,”_ she whines impatiently, squirming against him.

“Get on my back.”

“What?”

He turns around and offers his arms to hold her legs. “I’ll carry you.”

She hesitates. _“You’ll_ turn your ankle.”

He glances over his shoulder. “I’m wearing good trainers. And I’ve had more practice carrying you than you have running in clogs.”

It’s too tempting to resist, and she hops up on his back, wrapping her arms and legs around him again. His loping jog jostles her and their bags at first, until they find a rhythm, and then she laughs delightedly in his ear at the speed. He runs quickly, smoothly through the nighttime streets, only pausing when he needs to wait for traffic. Then she kisses his jaw and nips his ear and tells him how strong he is and how fast and how he better not tire himself out before they get home because she needs him and she loves him and she loves him and she loves him.

They arrive in record time.

She only lets herself down off his back so he can reach for his bag and find his front door key and slot it in and bound up the stairs holding her hand. He lets them into his flat, and he steps over the threshold and tries to tug her along, but she doesn’t follow. She stands immobile just outside the door, feeling the last few moments of the before Rey, because she’s about to go inside and he’ll shut the door behind them and then she’ll be the after Rey. He waits and watches as she says a silent goodbye.

She takes a deep breath and steps forward.

* * *

The urgency is gone, somehow. Their mad dash to get here has resulted in this: four tender hands and a slow undressing of two bodies. And one bedroom. They whisper each other’s names sometimes, just to hear it. _Rey,_ he breathes, and watches as her leotard gives up its secrets, inch by inch. Petal by petal. He doesn’t kiss her skin. He barely touches it. He peels her leotard down until he can see the fresh little blooms that curl shyly around her hips. He carefully tugs off her tights, kneeling at her feet. Then when she’s naked for him he looks up at her face and rises to his feet slowly, careful not to touch her body with his on the way up. So she can ease his shirt off and tuck her fingers below the three layers of elastic at his waist to pull them gently down.

He doesn’t make a sound as she frees his cock. Her cheek is inches away and her mouth waters for it, but she dips her head and continues her hands’ southward journey, following the blossoms down in their lush swirls over his thighs, all the way to his knees. Only his shins and calves are bare, and she pulls his tights and pants all the way off and gives him her hand to help him step out of them.

She sits back on her heels and looks at the work of art that he is. She doesn’t know which is more beautiful: his body or his flowers.

“Love,” he murmurs, holding his hand out for her, and she takes it and he pulls her gently to her feet and they stand there and look. No hiding.

He takes her other hand in his, too. His arms burst with color.

“I thought I had a lot,” she confesses.

“You have _so_ many.” He swallows thickly, and his eyes fill.

She bites her lip uncertainly. “Not as many as you.”

“This whole time,” he croaks, and his voice breaks. He clears his throat. “This whole time, I was hoping that you had some. Just on your chest, maybe, or even a few on your stomach. I didn’t even want to let myself dream that you had any on your back.”

“You never saw them, with all the time you spent standing behind me? Through my leotard, or makeup?”

He shakes his head and swallows. “I tried not to look at your back, except when I needed to.”

“Why?”

“I tried not to look at _you.”_

“Why?” she insists softly.

His hands squeeze hers. “You have no idea how much I wanted you, Rey. _No_ _idea.”_

She shivers.

“I didn’t think I could do it, at first. Dance with you and touch you and kiss you and not give it away. Not have it be immediately obvious to every single person who saw us together that no one had ever loved someone as much as I love you.”

She blinks back tears. “You really don’t mind that I don’t have as many?”

His eyes fall to her shoulders, her arms, her waist, and make their way back to her face. “The world would look at you and say you’re one in ten thousand, love. But I know better.”

“You do?” she asks hesitantly.

“There aren’t ten thousand people in the world. There aren’t even ten. There’s just you. And me. And you _love_ me.” His breath hitches with an incredulous reverence and he spreads her hands with his. “Look how much.”

She lets her tears spill into two salty trails, because there’s no need to hold them back. Her tears are his too. She doesn’t talk, just sinks down on the bed and takes him with her, and she lies down on top of him and kisses him but whenever she pulls back he rises up to try to follow her lips, and she smiles and lets him sit up so she’s kneeling on either side of his lap. Safe in his arms. Next to his heart. This is how it should be.

The first nudge feels foreign, and the stretch makes her eyes bulge and her lungs gasp, but she holds onto him and he holds onto her and she eases down bit by bit and together they do it. She stills, fully seated on him, and lets him kiss her parted lips and tell her _oh, Rey_ and _my love._

“Ben,” she murmurs, “love.” He agrees. He nods. He smooths her flushed cheek with his thumb. He kisses the corner of her mouth. He helps her when she holds onto his shoulders and pushes herself up so she can lower herself down onto him again. He cups her rear in his hands and helps lift her. She gasps and holds on, and his flowers are thick under her hands and his muscles are like iron.

“Ben,” she pleads, and he takes a break from lifting her to hug her tight to him and kiss her hot skin.

“Are you okay, love?”

She nods emphatically. “Mm hmm.”

“You’re so good at this.”

She laughs breathily against him. “So’re you.”

“What do you need? What do you want me to do?”

She smiles. “Just love me.”

Then she plants her hands back on his shoulders. Then she starts a rhythm that her legs have been unknowingly training for all these years. Then his hands find her rear again, and their pants mingle and their moans begin, and she climbs and climbs and he can tell when she’s close because there’s nothing about her body that he doesn’t know. Even this.

They fall apart together.

* * *

They don’t sleep more than about an hour at a time that night. He wakes her up at ten to carry her to the kitchen and sit her on the counter and stand in between her legs so he can feed her nuts and cheese and sliced pears. She wakes him up around midnight to show him the new flower budding over her pubic bone. He wakes her up at one to roll her onto his chest and wrap her in his arms and kiss her, because he held out as long as he could but he couldn’t wait any more. She wakes him just after two because she can, and she’s naked and so is he and there’s really no reason why his cock should be anywhere other than inside her. He wakes her at four to try to tell her how much he loves her, and she smiles and closes her eyes and strokes his hair. She wakes him at five so she can properly explore his flowers, and so he can tell her again how much he loves her. She wakes him at six thirty, too, because she realizes she was so busy listening to him tell her how much he loves her that she forgot to tell _him,_ so she does and then she reaches for his cock where it waits heavy and soft for her and she sucks his love out through the tip.

He wakes her at eight because they actually have to get up soon—that’s his excuse, anyway, but it’s really because it’s been far too long since he saw her smile, so she does and she throws open the curtains and jumps back in bed and tells him all the sex positions she wants to try, and he pretends to stuff his fingers in his ears so they won’t be late for work, but finally he pulls her down on her back and she giggles and holds onto the pillow above her and spreads her legs wide so he can fill her up.

“This,” he grunts, holding up her hips to meet his thrusts, “is my favorite thing to do in the world.”

Her foot twitches and she moans a laugh. “Better than ballet?”

He chuckles. “Maybe it’s a tie.” He punctuates the last word with a thrust that makes her eyes roll back in her head.

 _“Oh,_ Ben.”

“I’ll gladly do anything, as long as it’s with you.” He bends down to kiss her, and she smiles mischievously.

“I didn’t exactly need to... _oh God_...twist your arm to do this.”

“Good point.” He shifts his legs to kneel under her thighs, and he starts fucking her in earnest. “This is definitely my favorite.”

Her body curls like a corkscrew when she comes. He lies on top of her and does his best to give her nine years’ worth of kisses.

* * *

They don’t tell anyone at first. He keeps wearing his makeup, and she keeps wearing her high-necked leotards with sleeves. They are professionals, after all. They can continue on in the workplace like nothing has changed.

They wear each other out in the studio during the day, onstage in the evening, and in bed at night. Or at home, rather, because it doesn’t necessarily involve a bed. Ben solemnly writes out Rey’s list of desired sex positions, and they check them off one by one and intend to write down a review and rating but usually just whisper it to each other in bed after.

Some their bodies already know. When she goes up on tiptoe and stretches her leg up onto his shoulder, it’s familiar. They’ve done it before. The only part that’s new is a hard cock and a wet cunt and the way he grins at her playfully as he teases her with the tip, until she huffs and scolds him and he slides it in and all is forgiven. She’s learned to stop giving him significant _we’re trying this at home later_ looks during rehearsal because this Ben isn’t any better than nine-years-ago Ben at hiding his blushes.

She likes it when he puts all those muscles to good use and holds her standing, fucking her onto him as she holds on and feels. She likes too to be on top, pretending to hold him down, as if all his strength couldn’t make quick work of hers and flip her over and take whatever he wants. Sometimes he does. She buries her face in his shoulder and loves him.

They’re as eager as teenagers for each other. They have a lot of missed time to make up for.

They never have sex at work. That’s something Rey is particularly proud of, though it probably has more to do with the existence of hindrances like tights and leotards than any particular level of self-control. The couple who lives in the flat next to Ben’s leaves a politely mortified note asking them to decrease their nocturnal volume. They laugh until their sides hurt and they slide down from the sofa to the rug and practice making love quietly. It’s not an entirely successful experiment.

They buy a house.

* * *

They have a little garden, and as soon as they’re officially moved in Ben goes to the store and comes home with a lilac bush that proceeds to grow so tall it blocks the kitchen window. He jokingly complains about it sometimes, but she’s vocal in its defense, because it’s not like _their_ lilacs have stopped spreading, so why should the bush? Now when he pulls her nightshirt up and dives between her thighs to lap up what he finds there, he takes a break to kiss the lilacs by his ears. She tells him he used to be much better at eating her out before her flowers spread to her legs, and he locks her hips in his big hands and hums and sucks and worries her nub until she comes and comes again and admits that this might not be so bad after all.

Their sitting room opens with French doors onto the back garden. Whenever it rains on their day off, they open the doors wide and sit on the floor, cuddled in each other, and watch the rain and talk about things. Nothing important, really, except in the way that everything they say to each other is the most important thing in the world because they’re in love.

They get a cat. Ben barely sleeps for a week out of worry from the weighty responsibility for another living thing. Rey slings her arm over him in their bed and sleepily reminds him that he’s responsible for _her_ too, and she’s made it this far. “And you don’t even throw Felix five feet in the air and then catch him.”

“That’s different. You’re self-sufficient.”

She snorts. “Have you _met_ cats?”

They dance The Firebird. On opening night he leaves a lilac-scented candle in her dressing room with a note: _You’re the fire of my life._

She slips into his dressing room and tells him how freaking cheesy he is. He kisses her palms, because he can’t kiss her face without messing up her makeup, and she describes exactly what she’s going to do to him when they get home. His dance belt seems to fit a tad bit tighter when she slips back out.

They’re both promoted to principal at the conclusion of bows at the final performance. She drops the bouquet of flowers she’d been handed so she can hurl herself into his arms and cry. Their standing ovation goes on and on until her ears ring with it, and she cries tears she hadn’t even known she had and she never lets go of him.

At some point, the rest of the company collectively agrees to stop pretending they don’t know that Rey and Ben are very obviously together.

They take some good-natured ribbing without complaint. One day they don’t cover up their flowers. Ben doesn’t put on his makeup, and Rey wears a spaghetti-strapped leotard. When they walk into the studio for class in the morning, they expect catcalls or maybe whistles. Instead the room falls silent.

Her flowers stretch to her wrists now. His sleeves of blooms haven’t abated in the slightest. It’s easy at home to forget that this isn’t how the rest of the world is. All eyes are glued to them as they walk past hand in hand to their usual places at the barre. Someone starts crying, and then someone else, until there’s hardly a dry eye in the room. And in bed that night Rey clings to Ben and tells him they have to remember not to take it for granted. This much love. He cups her face in both hands and kisses her and moves inside her and promises they won’t.

Rey and Ben’s happiness is _nothing_ compared to Kay’s. She’d caught them holding hands in the stairwell one day and squealed so loudly that it echoed. Rey laughed her joy at having a friend to hug.

They go on double dates with Rose and Finn. Rose calls them in the middle of the night when her first flowers grow. Lilies. Poe’s company tours to London, and they have a raucous reunion lunch crowded in Rey and Ben’s minuscule dining room. Five around the table, just like it used to be. Except much better.

They dance In Bloom again when they’re twenty-eight. No sunflowers this time. Now they start with makeup covering all but a few lilacs, and then the makeup artist removes some of it for the second tempestuous movement, and then all the rest for the third. Now when she holds out her heart onstage, it’s not pretend. It’s his. Her flowers say so.

One top reviewer evidently didn’t get the message that the blooms were real. “Preposterous,” the review reads, “over-the-top makeup design. With flowers coating not just the couple’s arms, but legs too: a love beyond the wildest fairytale imagining. It so far surpasses excessive as to attain distractingly fantastical.”

They walk hand in hand to the corner market that morning to buy a copy of the paper. They come home and feed the cat and Ben picks some basil from the plant on the windowsill and chops veggies for omelets while she carefully cuts out the lines. They have paste this time, so she can stick it on a piece of paper. Closer to perfectly straight, but still not quite. He serves her her omelet on the kitchen table in the sunny corner nook and kisses the top of her head and goes to find a frame.

They hang it in their bedroom, next to another memory. The tomato sauce stains have faded a little.

_A love beyond the wildest fairytale imagining._

Yes.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading my story. ❤️
> 
> It’s for Fran, whose love and support and mind-boggling creativity I will never ever deserve, and for all of you, too. I think it’s going to be a while before I get tired of thinking up new ways to make these two space babies happy.
> 
> I’m on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/CeliaAnd2).


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